Graduate Students.

Alessandro Morosin

Research Interests: Alessandro’s scholarshiplies at the intersection of global political economy, social movements, and environmental sociology. His M.A. Thesis statistically analyzed how natural resource dependence influences human rights violations across the Global South. Thanks to several fellowships and grants, he has performed 9 months of qualitative fieldwork in Oaxaca, Mexico. His dissertation is a case study of how contemporary social movements handle framing, high-risk activism, gender relations, and natural disasters. This multi-site research details how pre-emptive mobilizations against Oaxaca’s Special Economic Zone emerged from pre-existing cultural structures, and how contending strands of feminism shape people’s lived experiences of gendered territorial activism. Alessandro also shows how the grassroots response to Southern Mexico’s September 2017 earthquake was socially constructed out of the collective oppositional identities latent in Mexico’s Tehuantepec Isthmus region.

Alessandro has enjoyed teaching Social Change, Globalization and Resistance, Race and Culture in the Americas, and upper division courses on Sociological Theory. He received his B.A. in Urban and Environmental Policy from Occidental College and an M.A. in Global and International Studies from UC Santa Barbara.